She builds on a lot of recent scholarship on the way that twentieth-century literature has been shaped by the businesses that make and sell books-work by pioneers in the field, like Janice Radway and Lawrence Rainey, and, more recently, scholars like Evan Brier, Gregory Barnhisel, and Loren Glass. Whether it also transformed the country is the tantalizing question that Paula Rabinowitz asks in her lively book “American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street” (Princeton). It was the first American mass-market-paperback line, and it transformed the industry. On June 19, 1939, a man named Robert de Graff launched Pocket Books. Print runs were modest and so, generally, were profits. Sometimes a book would be reprinted and sold again. They manufactured a certain number of titles every year, advertised them, sold as many copies as possible, and then did it all over the next year. Publishers sold a lot of their product by mail order and through book clubs, distribution systems that provide pretty much the opposite of what most people consider a fun shopping experience-browsing and impulse buying.īook publishers back then didn’t always have much interest in books as such.

Bookstores were clustered in big cities, and many were really gift shops with a few select volumes for sale.

Back when people had to leave the house if they wanted to buy something, the biggest problem in the book business was bookstores.

American Pulp by Paula Rabinowitz